I partly made a game. It is called Thrustburst.
I made a game! Well, I did the coding. Most of this was done in, oh, about two weeks a long while back… then we sat on it for ages and only in the last few days really finished it. It is fairly difficult; the point of it is to fly through a cave in order to destroy a large dangerous asteroid. Download, play, read the readme, or something.
In other news, a whole bunch of comments (well, okay, three, this isn’t exactly a high-traffic place for obvious reasons) on older posts got swallowed because Wordpress stopped notifying me of comments held in moderation for whatever reason. They exist now.
Okay. So I spent a lot of time getting little done because I was stuck doing civilian service. That ended this summer. I’ve done some work since (hopefully some evidence of that will show up in a few weeks, but that doesn’t depend solely on me); and now I’ve gone back to university to study “computer mathematics”, which is a new-fangled term for mathematics with a certain focus on the intersection with computer science. That would be entirely irrelevant if it wasn’t for the fact that among other things I have to take a basic C/C++ course; I don’t claim to be some sort of super genius, but this is expressly a course intended for people who just about have some approximate idea what a computer looks like, so for anyone who’s actually done some work in C++ it’s like having to listen to someone explain how to use a pencil… for several hours, every week.
Fortunately, such students are allowed to skip the basic exercises and just spend the semester proving their proficiency with some project of their own. So I’m doing this:
It’s not really anything so far, but it’s going to be some kind of shmup, as much of it purely generative as I can manage. I’m doing this partly because I haven’t actually written a near-classic style shmup before and partly because I’m interested in seeing how far I can get without human design intervention.
But right now, it’s just an ugly oval for the player (I’ve got to come up with something better), some pointless background frippery and those randomly generated polygon-and-line assemblies, which are going to be the enemies. I’m not sure it’s worth talking about at all at this point, but I felt I’d been too much of a void in recent months… I hope it’ll get more interesting in time, and may actually bring myself to write some more about it as it progresses, even if barely anyone reads it except millions of spambots, notifiers of whose cogent and insightful comments continue to sprinkle my inbox with joy. If nothing else, it might help me learn to write down ideas and plans more; I really should have stopped instinctively assuming I can contain the entire universe in my head a long time ago, but there it is.
(I did manage to go less than a year since the last post, though! Go me.)
Hah, over half a year and I’ve posted… once. Where have I been? Civilian service, mostly.
New things are coming. Eventually.
I appear to have started one of those “blogs” that all the kids are talking about these days. I’m a distressingly uninteresting person, so it’s a good thing this isn’t going to be about me; instead, it’ll mainly serve as a place to post about all my silly little projects so I don’t have to keep telling everyone I know who might be vaguely interested in them on my own.
For example: The Fear Show. It’s a generative art thing (an idea mostly stolen from Complexification), and it basically does things like this and this and this.
Or: Waterthingy, a cellular automatish particle toy like unto the Falling Sand Game. (I obviously haven’t ever had a single original thought)
And going back over a year now, isuck, a sort of space combat proto-game that was eventually going to be something in the general direction of Solar Winds, Star Control, or, rather, a 2D Elite or Privateer. Still thinking of going back to it eventually.
